 and welcome to another episode of Critical Conversations where we discuss hot topic issues related to the Muslim world. Past discussions have focused on social, religious, and political trends. And in this conversation, we'll add a new dimension to that conversation, namely the environment, in particular the impact of climate change on the Middle East. Our guest today is Professor Greg White of Smith College. Dr. White is the Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of government, the current chair of the government department, and a member of the Environmental Science and Policy Program Committee. He teaches courses on global environmental politics, international relations, migration and refugee politics, and international political economy. Dr. White's research and publications focus on Moroccan politics, environmental politics, and international security. Professor White, welcome to the program today. Thank you very much. It's a true pleasure to be here. Thank you. To start, if you could just please give an overview of this issue. What are the major implications of climate change in order of significance on daily life in the Middle East? And what have we seen already, and what are projected impacts? Of course, I mean, it goes without saying that's a very complicated question, but it's a good one, because the change in the past to this moment has been profound. It's been very, very significant throughout the region. I think one of the key things to think about when we look at the Middle East and North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin, is that you're looking at a part of the globe that is at 30 degrees north of the equator. And if you go all the way around the globe, it's basically going to take you around to all the major deserts in the world. So the United States and the Southwest, that's the Mojave Desert and the American Southwest. Over to the east, you have the Gobi Desert. And of course, where North Africa and the Middle East is, you have the Sahara going over to the Arabian Desert. So it's a very challenged region to begin with in terms of where it's positioned in the globe and the kind of climatic weather patterns it has and its natural attributes. But again, over the past bunch of decades, 30, 40, 50 years, the climate change has had a significant impact already on the region. Rising temperature, decreased rainfall, rising sea levels on coastal regions, which leads to salinization of groundwater. So the change in the region has been quite profound to this day. And looking forward, looking into the future, projections are significantly worrisome as they are for these other parts of the globe that I already mentioned as well. I might add the 30 degrees south is also the deserts of the south, the Atacama Desert in Chile, the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa and the Great Outback in Australia. So this is a really troubled band of the globe and this is where the Middle East and North Africa is positioned. And all the projections going forward are whether they be from moderate, medium range increases to severe increases of temperature, decreases in rainfall, increases in severe weather events, it's very concerning. It's a very challenged region to put it mildly. As we look about this band, roughly how many people, just if you size it, if the United States is 330 million people, how big a group of people are in this zone? Off the top of my head, I don't know. That's a really good question and that's something that I should know more readily. It's, I would guess in the order 400 million, 500 million, it depends what you consider to be part of the region. How far into Africa, for example, you range, whether it's the Sahara and then the Sahel that's to the south of the Sahara and then in the Eastern Mediterranean, same thing, what you consider to be part of the region. The short answer is that it's extremely populous and what's also significant about the population in the region is that demographically, it tends to be very young, which has to do with a whole complicated range of factors having to do with the kinds of development that the region has experienced. So demographically, it's challenged with this young population and very populous in turn. There's significant strain and stress on economic and social systems because of the large size of the population. So bigger than the United States, just using that as our measuring rod? For sure, absolutely. Bigger than the European market, which is 350, 400 million, absolutely. It's very populous indeed. And do you think just for curiosity sake, how, what is the issue in terms of the climate that is impacting the most people in this region right now? I think in one word, it's water. It's potable water, it's drinkable water, and as well as water for agricultural use. As well as water for industrial use because after all, so much water is used in industrial processes as well. So any effort to pursue economic development or economic growth requires significant water inputs into industry, into agriculture, and then of course into people's lives to exist. So as temperature increases, that increases rates of evaporation. As rainfall becomes more episodic and less prevalent, that similarly is a real issue. So yeah, in a word, water, and the effects that it has in the region. And I mentioned too that the groundwater is often salinated because of encroaching seas and evaporation again. So there's just the ability to find good, fresh water. It has bedeviled the region forever, for millennia has been a long-standing problem for this region as with any desertified region. But it's especially so in recent decades and moving forward as expected to be the case. And that's where I think climate change is so central as an issue. Obviously, I mean, that's our main concern and it's profound. But I think at the same time, we have to take into account policies that don't consider the realities of a kind of water-stressed region like this. So for example, in so many countries, they have tried to pursue the growth of crops for export, like citrus or tomatoes or grapes for wine. This is especially the case in North Africa, but it's also the case in even war-torn Yemen. You're trying to grow crops for export to international markets because they're lucrative and they bring back important foreign exchange, but those crops have a high water demand. Or if you try to develop your tourism, which is a significant part of the Jordanian economy or the Egyptian economy or the Moroccan economy, tourists like to take showers and they like swimming pools and they wanna go golfing. And in Marrakesh, outside Marrakesh in Morocco, they have water parks they've constructed for tourists. And it's laughable, it's preposterous, right? It's that kind of, how could that be in a region of the country that's arid? It's not desert in Marrakesh, but it's very arid. And it's a preposterous development strategy, if you will. And yet that's what they do to try to attract tourists. You had earlier mentioned Yemen, and if we think about Yemen, and we think about the Middle East generally, it's a conflict-prone area. Is it clear, this is going to be an added stressor on an already stressed region. Can you sort of prognosticate, is it clear what's going to happen or? A prediction, right? Yeah, I think it's hard to know. If I had a crystal ball, it would be fantastic if we were to have one. But it's definitely hard to know, but we can expect it to be extra challenging. It's certainly very challenging for a region. As Yemen, hopefully, I mean, it's hard, as you would try to be optimistic that somehow the conflict will come to a close at some point in the future. Who knows when? It doesn't seem to be in the near horizon. But when it does come to a close, environmental stress, water, all these kinds of issues certainly hamper post-conflict reconstruction. It's really hard to rebuild a society when you are dealing with scarcity of water and challenges for growing food for the population. So it can only exacerbate an already difficult situation. When you talk about recovering from these issues or forming economies around these issues in ways that are more sustainable and renewable, this region in particular, I'm sure there are so many difficulties to that because it's one of the world's biggest producers of oil too, which is its own issue. But within this sense, how does the oil economy of the Gulf region and the Gulf States impact this region's response to potential climate-induced conflict? And politically and just economically, and are there positive trends that you see in this region? I'll set aside the positive trends. Maybe no, is a quick answer to that. So maybe I'm not sending this side. I think the answer is no. The fact that so many of the economies in the region are dependent on oil has been a real curse, if you will. I mean, it's that old label, the resource curse. These countries have the resource paradox, the resource curse. The founder of OPEC, Venezuelan, by the name of Perez, said that we are drowning in La Mier de Diablo. We're drowning in the devil's poop. And so this is that oil is a real resource curse for so many countries. And it's very, very rare to find an instance of a country that has, or maybe a state in the case of Alaska, that has taken oil resources and managed them responsibly and in a just fashion. And the Middle East and the countries of the Middle East are no exception in that regard. They've had a real challenge with it. It's caused all kinds of distortions in the ways their economies have developed. Because they rely on the rents, the profits that are derived from the extraction of oil and the selling of oil overseas. And then that just affects the rest of the economy. Sometimes countries have been known to take some of that oil wealth and turn it into social programs and other ways of developing the economy. But it's really hard to do. I think an additional piece of this too is that a lot of the countries in the region when it comes to climate negotiations, whether it be Kyoto 20 years ago or more, well, 20 years ago. And then more recently, Paris, the oil producing nations are often very much aligned against efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions because they see it as a threat to their economic model. So there are strong lobbyers and strong parts of coalitions that work to undermine, if you will, sort of undercut these kinds of negotiations. So it's the kind of economic development that has happened. It's the kind of diplomatic politics that happen for climate change negotiations. Oil implicates all of us, right? We need it. We use it in our own economies around the globe. And so in that ways, citizens around the globe are implicated in the need for oil. But that's a long answer to your question. Is it, how does it complicate it? It definitely does. And moving forward, it's hard to see how, absolutely moving away from oil and reliance on oil for energy production, that it could be improved. And you talk about the impact on people around the globe in terms of an oil economy. But I've also heard that in the countries where oil is the prime, where it's economy based off of oil, primarily, that they tend towards dictatorship. There's something about oil and the fact that it's such a resource that can control the global markets that has impact with the people in those countries too. Is that something that you've seen or can speak to? Wow, that's a trippy question. I mean, that's a really good question, right? Because there are definitely oil economies that are not autocrat, Scotland, Norway. Yeah, I mean, there are Alaska. I mean, it's possible to have an oil economy within a government that doesn't lend toward autocracy. But then, so I guess for me, though, that I wonder if that then leads us to a kind of chicken-egg question. It's hard to know whether oil emerges in, whether oil encourages autocracy, autocratic governments to emerge, or whether autocratic governments, I don't know, are susceptible to developing oil in the way that they do so. I tend to think it's the, if it's one of those two, it's the one where the presence of oil wealth distorts the incentives on the part of the government, and it also leads to support for those governments by external actors, not least European colonial powers and, in turn, the United States in the context of the Cold War, and the close support that the United States and Europe have given to autocratic countries in the region in exchange for stability and extraction of oil. A good example of that, if I could, real quick, is Gaddafi in Libya. For many, many years, especially after 2003, when Gaddafi relinquished WMD, the Weapons of Mass Destruction, he did pretty well by Europe. He would argue that he was doing Europe's work. He was providing Italy and Europe more broadly with natural gas and oil, and he was interdicting migrants coming across from, that might've wanted to go to Europe. And when the NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began its bombing of Libya in 2011, in March of 2011, Gaddafi was enraged. He felt betrayed that Europe and the United States, that NATO was doing this. After all, I have done for you, you're bombing me now? So it's that sort of bargain that is often made with autocratic leaders. And he felt like he'd kept up his hand inside of the bargain. You talk about, this is almost a paranoid question. Us talking about this, do you think that as people come to realize that this region, maybe perhaps differentially from the rest of the world, will be more severely impacted by climate change? Could we be contributing, even around this table right now, to sort of people taking actions like having tighter borders against people from that region, sort of in anticipation of people fleeing that? Or could it encourage more conflict like we talked about? Or is, you know, there's the other school of thought that would say, yeah, understanding the problem is the first step towards solving the problem. Do you have any line of sight on that? No, and I think I'd be in the latter part of that question, because it's sort of understanding the problem would begin to provide suggestions of the kind of policies that should be pursued, because you're absolutely right. One mode of thought might be to say, well, this is a conflict prone region historically, and it's been thus to the present time, and moving forward, it looks like it's going to continue to be in many, many different parts of the region. So the solution should be a security minded one. Let's build borders, let's pick winners and allies in terms of the factions that are fighting, and try to contain the violence, and try to contain the brewing trouble in the region. And that's certainly a common sort of mode of thinking among policy makers. There's no doubt about it. It's an easy one in some ways to move toward, because it not plays on fears, but just sort of follows the logic, you know, that this is the nature of the situation, and that's what you must do most immediately. There is an immediate logic, isn't there? I think if you take Angela Merkel as an example, sort of took the compassionist route, but as a certain point, the immediate logic of lots of people coming in, is very hard politically to argue against, I think. Yeah, and that's the refugee crisis in 2014, 2015, 2016, and even the last two years, of course, but especially a few years ago in which she did that. Yeah, that has profound implications for European politics and for German politics more directly, absolutely. Of course, at the same time, most of the refugees and people who were displaced in the region stayed within the region. The vast bulk did not move out of the region, in this case toward Europe. But I think that, back to your question, it was a really good one, because it's the idea that there has to be ways, that creative solutions have to be found to begin the process of backing out of the situation as it is right now. So that's why we, sitting around this table, sort of thing, we have to move toward mitigation. We have to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are going into the atmosphere. We have to move toward renewables and removing the incentives for the production of this kind of oil that affects the economic development and affects the climate. So there has to be mitigation efforts and there has to be adaptation efforts. So rather than building borders and hardening security, work with governments in the region on their adaptation to already existing climate change. Encourage them not to build these kinds of water parks to be flip about it. Encourage them to figure out ways to make their populations resilient to increasing temperatures and less rainfall. If I'm not mistaken, there actually is a thousand foot ski slope in Saudi Arabia, just to... In the Gulf, yeah, it's an indoor slope. Same idea, obviously profoundly energy-intensive to power that. Now they have the oil to do so. They can certainly do it. But then there are some bright spots in the horizon. For example, the use of solar power is becoming more and more common in Morocco. There are in North Africa and in the Gulf as well, there are solar arrays that are significant and that technology is improving and that can be expanded on. I would hope, I would argue, and would push for. We'll knock on wood. To continue, yeah, to continue this talk about the opportunities, if you will, within this kind of issue. What do you think, is there any risk in, or opportunities in using climate change, conflict data and research to reframe internal conflicts as shared external problems, which involve fashions can work together to solve? Because oftentimes when there's a larger issue that two groups have to combat, it's that that can maybe work out internally to both of their benefit in some way. Yeah, this is the challenge in the scholarship and the scholarly literature on this. This is one of the situations where we end up saying, on the one hand, on the other hand, it's really unclear. Believe me, it won't surprise you both to know that the scholars have spent a lot of ink on this and published a bunch on these kinds of issues and made a lot of studies. What we have is we have a lot of data about scarcity and environmental change. And we also have a lot of data about conflict. And when you take those two data sets and you put them together to see if there's a correlation between increasing scarcity and increasing conflict, the findings are really divergent. I mean, there are some studies that say, yeah, increasing environmental scarcity leads to more conflict. And then there are others that say to the contrary. And the logic for the second group is that because there's scarcity, that actually diminishes conflict because in order for people to fight in order for people to have conflict, they have to have resources, they have to have strength, they have to have the ability to do that. And in the context of scarcity, that ability is diminished. So we have these kind of conflicting arguments. And then what people do, again, this won't surprise you, is they do meta studies. They do studies of studies. And this is not unlike epidemiological literature on healthcare matters, trying to figure out what's to be found. And in that instance, same thing. There are some meta studies that show that it's connection and there's some that show that there's no connection. And so for me, what that leads me to think is that what we have to do is we have to keep climate change as kind of an environmental change as a background sort of context. As this sort of situation, it's real, it's happening, and it has to be addressed. But in terms of the conflict, the direct conflict itself, other approaches have to be pushed. You have to push for diplomacy. You have to push for economic development. You have to encourage all kinds of ways of trying to diminish conflict rather than saying the environment's getting worse and it's bad and it's going to cause more conflict. So, well, we might as well just prepare for the conflict. So that's the logic that I think is very circular and leaves us down to sort of a kind of thinking that doesn't take us out of the, you know, fruitful attempts to try to find fruitful solutions. Yeah, almost Armageddon becomes a self-fulfilling Armageddon. Yeah, the only thing worse than, you know, the worst way of thinking about tomorrow is thinking about tomorrow as being, you know, just sort of bad. Yeah, and that kind of apocalyptic thinking or a catastrophist thinking leads to a kind of policy stance that is back to the security piece. You know, it's all about security and conflict. And I think that's the worst part for me. But isn't there an opportunity also to think about, you talked about economic development as a way to kind of secure the region a little bit more? Isn't there hope in the fact that, like, eventually we will all need to transition our economies and, you know, innovate to address this issue? And so if this region is kind of having to do that maybe a little faster than other parts of the world, isn't there a little, aren't there opportunities in that? Can't they kind of become the leaders in this or, you know, they're beheld to oil or there, but is there some opportunity with this in terms of economic development and this issue? And yeah, it's a really good question because I think that there are people on the ground in the region. Again, I'm more familiar with North Africa. There are people on the ground who get it. I mean, they understand that, you know, it's getting warmer. They understand that it's harder to grow crops, that it's harder to get clean water. In Morocco, there are rural women in the Middle Atlas who are working to obtain clean water. And they protest, they clamor for it and they create all kinds of inventive ways of retaining water and storing water. So they are working on it, they're working to adapt to it. I think those of us sitting around the table need to support that. And we need to support governments that in turn will support that and rather than governments that will pursue economic policies that are, you know, more beneficial to affluent groups and kind of a bad development, a maldevelopment, a poorly designed development. You know, as we sort of come to the close of what's this kind of fascinating discussion that it's good to think that there's something that we can do, that we three and those people that actually watch our conversation. And do you think, is there hope? I guess that's my bottom line question. I think so, and I mean, I would turn to leave too. I mean, I'd like to think there's hope. You have to, if that's why my concern is if people move in that apocalyptic or it's just gonna get worse and worse and worse, then the solution is survivalism. But if you say, no, there's gotta be ways of getting out of this. You know, people are not going to disappear in the next 10, 20, 40, 60, 80 years. Let's make it better. I think that's the kind of mode that we have to move in. And again, I would turn to you as a young person. You know, what's your take? I am hopeful, but I think I'm also naive. And that's why we have you, because when this issue is studied, and I think that also comes back to what you're saying, is that when there's more information about an issue, that future generations, even if a current generation can't solve it, but a future generation will have more tools to do so with historical analysis or just looking at trends. And so I think that hope can bring about change, but also I think that the data needs to be there too. So I think that both generations and all facets of society can provide that if we focus on it. Yeah, I think if we can just recognize what the problem is, which we're struggling with here, and evidently, I was sorry to hear there, I think there's hope. But I, for one, no longer talk about climate change affecting my grandkids, it's affecting grandpa. And that's as it should be, in a way. Well, thank you very much for being here today. And actually, Leif, I wanna thank you for actually making this connection. It's not every high school student that has the thought to bring together these resources on this project. Thanks very much. Thank you very much.